#a far superior way to the mass reblogging of a post a million times to give it notes

[theragamuffininitiative]

When you accidentally end up scrolling your own blog for several posts thinking "wow the mutuals are really synced today" before realizing

[apenitentialprayer]

Gandhi and the Holocaust

An odd title, I know. But given the post I’ve seen circling around yesterday and today, a post that has unfortunately gotten the attention of thousands, I feel the need to address several of the points that it brings up. Before we go into some of these points, however, I feel like I need to mention that Gandhi’s way of thing was not anthropocentric in nature; it was theocentric. And right off the bat, that means a lot of you will not really accept to even consider his worldview as valid. Which is fine, whatever. But that is important; the two paths to God that he claimed were higher than any others were Truth and Nonviolence. In the case of the former, this does not necessarily mean factual truth, but rather adherence to an educated, well-formed conscience, and in this way follows a view similar to that of Thomas Aquinas. This adherence to the conscience should be absolute, even if this demands immense suffering or even martyrdom at the hands of those who seek to convince a person to rescind their most sacred convictions. In the words of Gandhi, quoted by Erik Erikson, “To make any progress we must not make speeches and organize mass meetings but be prepared for mountains of suffering” (Gandhi’s Truth, 306). In the case of the latter, nonviolence must be understood in its proper context. Gandhi saw two separate types of nonviolence; the first, “nonviolence of the weak.” This type of nonviolence is that of passivity in the face of evil because one does not have the power to confront that evil, and so this form of nonviolence has no moral value whatsoever. In fact, Gandhi equated such nonviolence with cowardice, and said that it would be better to violently confront evil than to give in to the temptation of this nonviolence. The morally perfect nonviolence, the “nonviolence of the strong,” was essentially the nonviolence taught by Jesus; though you have the ability to fight back, you choose not to. This choice must not be out of fear, or it is actually of the first variety, nor should there be any hatred towards persecutors, or the act of nonviolence is stained with an implicit form of violence. Rather, it should be done out of love of, and recognition of the humanity of, the persecutor. This does not ensure easy victory, of course; as Erik Erikson states, “it is almost a rule that powerful opponents, in their stubborn bewilderment over being faced with this new nonviolent kind of struggle, become more ruthless” (Gandhi’s Truth, 342). But the point of such nonviolence is not necessarily victory within this lifetime, but the purification of the individual through suffering for the Truth. This, of course, invites metaphysics into politics, something that many of even his closest friends did not like. To a certain extent, this even more savage response can be seen as a good thing, because it presents the persecuted with more chances of being witnesses to love and truth, and will hopefully affect the consciences of the persecutors (or, at the very least, the indifferent masses who see these events unfold). Much like the early Christian martyrs, then, Gandhi advocated for upholding truth at whatever the cost, enthusiastically suffering for the truth when given the chance of rescinding their views or being punished, and loving and identifying with the humanity of one’s persecutors. For more information on how this would have worked on a theoretical level, I highly recommend Raghavan Iyer’s The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. Now, let’s move on to how this influenced Gandhi’s view of the Holocaust : “Criticized the Jews for defending themselves against the Holocaust because he insisted that they should have committed public mass suicide in order to “shame” the Germans instead of fighting back. His exact words were, “But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from the cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.” Okay. Let’s start with an early letter, dated to late November of 1938. What we see in this letter is an admittance of Hitler’s psychopathy (”The tyrants of old never went so mad as Hitler seems to have gone”). We also see Gandhi exhorting German Jews to organize and fight this oppression nonviolently, and doing this even if individual Jewish people must act alone at first. Gandhi knew that they were dying; and (as the above quote from that insufferable post even shows) it is by virtue of the fact that they were being killed that Gandhi saw the need for them to nonviolently resist. “If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now.” In fact, in Gandhi’s mind, it would be better; they would “preserve their self-respect,” and give them “inner strength and joy.” Further, “what has today become a degrading man-hunt can be turned into a calm and determined stand offered by unarmed men and women possessing the strength of suffering given to them by Jehovah. It will be then a truly religious resistance offered against the godless fury of dehumanised man.” This goes back to Gandhi’s conceptions of victimhood and sacrificial love (see Faisal Devji’s The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence, pages 143-146 for more information). In Gandhi’s way of thought, victimhood in and of itself grants no moral dignity to the victimized. This is an admitted divisive statement; some people will argue against it tooth and nail, while others will agree that claiming victim status does not make one morally superior. That’s not a question I want to go into right now (though I suspect the former will never reconcile themselves to Gandhian morals and metaphysical ideals). What makes victimhood a path to moral virtue, then, is one’s willingness to suffer it with love. This course of action has two effects; first, it grants agency to the persecuted. The persecuted is no longer just a victim to circumstance, but an active force that has to power to decide how they are going to die. The human will being equated with the very essence of personhood in Gandhian thought, this is absolutely paramount. The second effect deals with the persecutor; by accepting the humanity of the persecutor and allowing oneself to die, the persecuted gives the persecutor the chance to, in turn, recognize the humanity of the persecuted and change his actions based of off this recognition of a shared humanity. In other words, the persecuted allows himself to become an opportunity for the persecutor’s redemption. This is a radical idea, one on par with the ideas taught by Jesus and the early Church Fathers. Gandhi’s hope was that the persecuted everywhere would come to love their persecutors so radically that it would evoke a change within the persecutors, if not at the moment of persecution than at least in the future, when they had time to reflect on their actions. This is, again, clearly not a particularly humanistic view; Gandhi subordinates the value of human life to what he sees as the ultimate values of Truth and Nonviolence. And, as Faisal Devji points out, given that the Allies were willing to sacrifice millions of lives to defeat the Axis powers, is it really fair to call out Gandhi’s own willingness to sacrifice lives to end the war? Of course, this letter also reveals just how badly Gandhi misunderstood the Nazis’ ultimate goal; Gandhi compares the Indians of South Africa to the Jews of Germany, stating “the Indians occupied precisely the same place that the Jews occupy in Germany.” This is a statement that is extremely ignorant, and unequivocally false, even at this early stage of the war. Gandhi also believed “the persecution had also a religious tinge.” This is also false; the German hostility towards the Jewish people was racial in nature. Here, Gandhi has confused the (not unprecedented, but not yet mainline) racial antisemitism of the Nazis with the theological antisemitism prevalent in Christianity. In other words, Gandhi at this stage believed that the Jewish people were being persecuted because of their beliefs and practices, and not for simply existing. Had Gandhi had realized this earlier, the way he would have wrote about the Jewish persecution in Germany may have been different. In fact, Faisal Devji goes so far as to say “Had he known about it, the Mahatma would undoubtedly have pointed to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 as an illustration of his teachings. For this struggle was dedicated not to the victory or even the survival of the Jews trapped in Warsaw who resisted the German armed forces in an unequal battle, but rather to ‘the honor and glory of the Jewish people,’ words the uprising’s motto in defiance of all political calculation” (The Impossible Indian, 144). If you’re interested in seeing a Jewish perspective of victimhood and agency in a German concentration camp, I highly recommend Man’s Search for Meaning, the first half of which is Viktor Frankl’s memoir of his time at Auschwitz death camp (you can find some quotes from it in my Viktor Frankl tag) What we see in Gandhi is a man whose appreciation of suffering, like Mother Teresa’s, is deeply misunderstood by the secular mind. Gandhi believed above all else the supremacy of the twin values of Truth and Nonviolence, and the lengths at which he would talk about them on a theoretical level are enough to make many people uncomfortable. But this was not some cold-hearted disregard for the Jewish people. This was Gandhi’s understanding of the value of suffering, the heroism of martyrdom, and (to a fair extent) his ignorance of the Nazi state of mind. You don’t have to agree with his viewpoint, and it is fair to criticize it, but to label him a monster for it is misguided, at best. @patron-saint-of-smart-asses and @marschattpanosh, I had seen you two reblog the cursed post.™ If you have any comments about this, or want me to address any more questions and concerns about Gandhi, let me know.